Drupal Web Guidelines

Drupal is now the primary content management system (CMS) for Emory University websites. This transition will modernize our web presence while maintaining flexibility for Emory’s schools and units.

Because approximately 600 websites across the university will need to be transitioned, migrations will be staggered, and departments can choose when to migrate. The following steps can help guide your process, and tell you how to begin.

Next Steps

Whether you are migrating or creating a new website, planning your structure and content will ensure an efficient and successful project.

Coordinate your plan

The earlier you start, the better prepared you will be.  

• Decide which sites you wish to migrate and in what order. 
• Determine who in your department or unit will have primary responsibility for the migration project. 
• Communicate plans with your leadership. 

Audit your existing site and clean up your website’s content

Decide what content you plan to keep, update, or delete across your web infrastructure. 

• Use analytics to identify content that receives little or no traffic and consider eliminating it. 
• Delete outdated or duplicative materials, especially PDFs. 
• Update content on all pages as needed. 
• Determine whether you are responsible for any sites that are no longer needed and can be sunset. 
• Create a plan for archiving deleted content. 
• Plan redirects by building a spreadsheet of removed pages with clear instructions on where the old URLs should redirect.

Cascade CMS (Legacy Hosting)

Cascade is not going away immediately. However, at some point Emory anticipates ending our license agreement with its provider, Hannon Hill. Development in Cascade is no longer supported by Emory, so site owners will need to use third-parties for development on these sites. We strongly encourage you to migrate your site to Drupal as soon as it is economically feasible in order to maintain support and website security. Older websites are invariably less accessible, and that is another strong reason to move into the Emory Drupal ecosystem when you can.